Will Prelude be the product?

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I’m always searching the web for things that might be tied in to the funeral/cremation or greater Death Care business world.  Just the other day I came across a website for a company in the preneed arena which has a home page that states, “The Promise of Preneed“.

The company is Prelude and here is the website.  I’m not exactly sure of how the company operates but it appears to me that they partner with funeral homes or other disposition providers to offer almost instant preneed funeral policies to consumers.  Diving into the website and LinkedIn a little deeper here’s three things that they claim:

1. Prelude leads you and your customers through intuitive prompts and questions that helps them thoughtfully preplan their funeral.
2. Customers design their preneed plans, Prelude creates the ideal policy recommendations.
3. Pricing is generated instantly and customers can fully bind a policy in under ten minutes.

The LinkedIn site also states, “With Prelude, any employee in your office can walk a customer through our intuitive iPad-based experience and make a preneed sale, without needing to be a licensed agent.”

Here is the website for Prelude.

Tom Anderson
Funeral Director Daily

Funeral Director Daily take:  I operated a funeral home for over 30 years.  In that time period I did all kinds of advertising and public relations for the funeral home and it became apparent to me that the easiest and most cost-efficient way to build future market share was through the sale of preneed funeral policies.

Preneed funeral policies were a pretty simple sale — especially those types of policies that guaranteed that the consumer could have the option to use the proceeds at a different funeral home in the chance that they moved out of the area or our funeral home would be closed or acquired.  In essence, potential consumer clients knew that a funeral policy was not like a term-insurance policy or a Long-Term Care policy that “might be used in the event of. . . ”   Funeral policies were certain to be used at some point in time — at the time of death of the policy-holder. . . . They could be thought of as “Set-it-up and forget-about-it” policies for a future peace of mind.

And the great thing about “Set-it-up” and “Forget-about-it” is that once that was done there was not a great deal of “retention contact” necessary to make sure that death call was at your funeral home. . . . in essence, the future market share growth was virtually assured.

Our funeral home got pretty good at marketing the pre-need policies at a very reasonable customer-acquisition cost.  We used monthly seminars that were well attended by retirement folk and those seminars provided tons of leads.  That kind of customer acquisition still works today and if your funeral home is not doing it yet drop an e-mail to Patrick Zalusky at Laker Planning (lakerp@aol.com) who can be your one-contact to get everything done for a successful and well attended seminar almost anywhere in the country.

However, the big key to getting more and more people into pre-arrangements with your funeral home in today’s world might also entail the option of enrolling and signing up future clients online without them having ever met you.  We know more and more people want to do this planning in the comfort of their own home, but it is our opinion, no one in the profession has really got this concept down to the correct science yet. . . . For instance, we know that there is a reluctance by the consumer to make a one-time pre-payment for future death care services via credit card.   Might it be easier with monthly pre-approved drafts?  I think so and maybe an online-insurer can do that.

I don’t know much about Prelude, but maybe it might be worth your while to check into what their website says, “Discover a modern planning tool designed to complement your relationship-driven business.

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